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Far Cry 3 - PC

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Summary:

Far Cry 3 puts players in control of Jason Brody, a tourist who finds himself on a lawless island where rebels have spent years mired in bloody conflict. Gamers can explore the jungles, swamps, mountains, and beaches of the island in a variety of ways, including speeding over land in jeeps, trucks, and ATVs, soaring through the air in hang gliders, and gliding across the water in speedboats. A separate co-op mode spins an entirely different story, as four crew members of a seedy cruise ship set out on a six-chapter campaign to track down the captain who stole their valuables and sold them out to pirates. Other multiplayer features include classic modes in which gamers team up to capture land or kill the most enemies, while the Firestorm mode finds two teams competing to turn opposing bases into raging infernos.

7.9

Thanks to a series of terrible policies and decisions, Ubisoft's PC ports of their big-budget titles have been something to avoid for quite a while now. Thankfully, FarCry 3 manages to break this trend by being the best version of the game available on any platform. That said, is FarCry 3 a game worth buying at all?

Unlike most big-budget releases this year, the aspect of the game that UbiSoft pushed the most before its release was the story. To be sure, the story is very unique, particularly for a first person shooter. You play a rich young playboy who is on a vacation in the tropics when he parachutes into an island that turns out to be inhabited with pirates. From there, he joins a tribe of natives and goes on a quest to rescue his friends.

The part of this plot that Ubisoft spent so much time playing up was the head of the pirates, Vaas Montenegro, and his insanity. Vaas is certainly the best villain of the year, but FarCry 3 doesn't use him nearly as much as they should. While his specter is always looming above you as you make your way thorough the early parts of the game, about halfway through the campaign he dies, and the story stops being anywhere near interesting. In addition to the failure of this core point, the game also creates several threads that they never bother to touch again, making the story seem like it was written in vertical slices that were never meant to come together.

The game has been called "Skyrim with Guns" more times than I can count, and it is certainly an appropriate moniker. The most fun to be have in the game is just driving around the island and checking out every interesting point on the map. There are multiple different kinds of collectibles to get, radio towers to climb, and camps to liberate.

The game also features an in-depth crafting system that lets you kill the animals that are found all over the island and create upgrades using the skins that allow you to equip more weapons, hold more healing items, and carry more weapons, which contributes the most to the game's Skyrim-esque feel.

When you get bored of the open world and decide to do the actual campaign, that's when it truly gets dull. More campaign missions than not are either poorly designed or incredibly boring shoot-fests. For example, there are several missions that require you to stealth your way through a camp full of guards without alerting anyone, which is very apparent this game was not designed to do well.

FarCry 3 is a great open world game with a sub-par campaign, but just the open world by itself is more than enough to justify the ticket price. The PC version of this game features incredible looking graphics and a bevy of settings to make it look as good as it can, easily making it the best version of the game.